Naked in the Promised Land

H
OUGHTON
M
IFFLIN
C
OMPANY
Boston New York 2003

Copyright © 2003 by Lillian Faderman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Visit our Web site:
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faderman, Lillian.
Naked in the promised land / Lillian Faderman.
p. cm.
ISBN
0-618-12875-1
1. Faderman, Lillian. 2. Scholars—United States—Biography.
3. Lesbians—United States—Biography. 4. Jews—United
States—Biography. 1. Title.
CT
3990.
F
33
A
3 2003
305.48'8924073'092—dc21 [
B
] 2002032233

To ensure the privacy of certain persons who appear in this book,
some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

Book design by Anne Chalmers
Typefaces: Janson Text, Copperplate

Printed in the United States of America
QUM
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

F
OR
A
VROM

My deep gratitude goes to the many friends who read this book in its numerous versions, made helpful suggestions, and gave me encouragement: Rosie Pegueros, Ruth Schwartz, Linda Garber, Barbara Blinik, Ruth Blinik, Joyce Aiken, Rosalind Ravasio, Charlie Bolduc, Joyce Brotsky Virginia Hales, Sharon Young, and Olivia Sawyers. Special thanks to Frankie Hucklenbroich, Steve Yarbrough, and Beatrice Valenzuela.

It would have been impossible for me to finish the manuscript without the gift of time from my colleagues and the administration at California State University, Fresno. I'm especially grateful to Luis Costa and Michael Ortiz.

My editor, Elaine Pfefferblit, believed in this project from the start and has made me feel her support. Thank you. Sandy Dijkstra continues to be a great friend and a terrific agent.

I'm blessed in my family—Avrom Irwin Faderman and Phyllis Irwin. Thank you for your sweet nurturance.

Acknowledgments
vii

I L
ILLY

1 
HOW I BECAME AN OVERACHIEVER
3

2 
GOING CRAZY IN EAST L.A.
24

3 
CRUSHED
44

4 
MEN I
64

5 
SHEDDING
87

II L
IL

6 
HOLLYWOOD
105

7 
MY MOVIE-ACTRESS NOSE
130

8 
THE OPEN DOOR
142

9 
GETTING THE GIFT OF WISDOM
160

10 
KICKED OUT
173

11 
A JEWISH PRINCE
190

12 
A MARRIED WOMAN
207

III L
ILLIAN

13 
HIGHER EDUCATION
227

14 
HOW I BECAME A BURLESQUE QUEEN
247

15 
MEN II
267

16 
PROFESSOR FADERMAN
286

17 
HOW I BECAME A COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR
306

18 
SHEAVES OF OATS
331

19 
EPILOGUE
351

H
OW COULD I NOT
have spent years of my life lusting after the golden apple—the heft of it, the round, smooth feel of it, the curve of it in my small hand? When I was three months old and a war was raging across the ocean, my mother rocked me in her arms in a darkened theater. On the silver screen, here in America, in the Bronx, was Charles Boyer, a duke with a mansion in Paris, another in the Loire, another in Corsica. His sumptuous abodes were concocted by a lunatic confectioner: furniture, curtains, ceilings, walls—all of billowy whipped cream. If the movie had been in Technicolor, everything would surely have been ivory, heaven blue, sun gold. My mother—a shopgirl, an immigrant, no husband—stared with open mouth, rapt, all but drooling at Boyer and paradise. When she remembered, she dandled me a bit in her arms, praying I would be silent long enough to let her see—one more glimpse of the duke, of his mansion, of the story. This she told me.

I did not cooperate. From fitful sleep I awoke to bawl, to shriek with new lungs, with all my strength.

To the lobby and back with me. One more glimpse for her, and to the lobby again.

"See," she softly crooned. "Look, see." Standing in the back of the theater, she held me up to better see the screen. It was the handsome duke she wanted us to see, and the many mansions. For a moment my mouth was open too in rapt attention.

We went home together, I in her arms, in the late October cold sunset to our little rooms in the Bronx. She wrapped the blanket tighter around me and held me to her breast so that no cold could reach me. But her head was full of Duke Boyer with his bedroom eyes and kissy mouth and mansions.

For my first three months we'd been living on "relief," as welfare was called in New York in 1940, and my mother didn't have to work. We could go to movies together to our hearts' content. But it couldn't last.

"You have to sue the baby's father," the relief worker told my mother in the loud voice she used for people who didn't speak English well. "The Bronx can't be supporting you and her forever." She printed the address of the public lawyer in big, careful letters and told my mother what subway to take.

"That's not my baby," my father swore on the stand, and the judge believed him. He didn't have to pay my mother a cent.

The Bronx didn't have to pay any more cents either, the relief worker said. That was when my aunt—
the funny monkey,
my mother called her—came to live with us and take care of me, and my mother went back to the garment factory where she'd been a draper before I was born. No more movies and outings in the cold for me.

My aunt kept me well bundled in the cramped and overheated apartment and crooned Yiddish lullabies to me all day long.
Unter Lililehs viegeleh...Under little Lilly's cradle stands a pure white goat. The little goat went to market, to buy you raisins and almonds.
A foghorn voice came out of her short body. I stared up at her with huge love eyes. She held me to her heart and I crawled in forever, she said.
A kush on dyneh shayneh bekelech, a kush on dyneh shayneh pupikel,
a kiss on your pretty little cheeks, on your pretty little belly button.
Smack, smack
would go her lips in big goopy kisses on my briefly exposed skin, and I was beside myself with glee.

My mother called her Rae, and I'd never heard the word
aunt,
so when I began talking I called her My Rae. I became roly-poly because My Rae was always sticking into my mouth big spoonfuls of whatever she was cooking in our small kitchen—prune compote, potato and carrot
tzimmes,
boiled chicken with noodles, My-T-Fine Chocolate Pudding. "Open the
moileleh,
the little mouth," she said and grinned ecstatically when I did. In went the compote, in went the
tzimmes.
"A
michayeh,
a pleasure," she said. I learned to walk months later than most kids because when My Rae wasn't cooking or making her sewing machine go
whirr, whirr
with the piecework she did for money, she never let me out of her arms.

They were the only two of their family who, in 1923, had made it to the safe shores of America, long before Hitler marched through Prael, their shtetl in Latvia, and wiped out everyone else—a crippled brother, two sisters, the sisters' husbands, the sisters' five children. It was not supposed to work out that way. "This is what you must do," the grandmother I never saw told her eldest daughters, my mother (a sylph, an eighteen-year-old beauty) and my aunt (a bulldog, the chaperone). The poorest of the poor were going off to America and sending back dollars
and pictures of themselves dressed like the nobility. Why should her two daughters be any less lucky? They were to marry rich men in America and bring the rest of the family over.

They'd been in America for almost twenty years, their parents had died, and neither my mother nor my aunt had married, not even by the time I was born to my mother and her lover in 1940. She'd been with him for eight years. He'd told her from the beginning that he wasn't the marrying kind, but she loved him, so she couldn't help herself.

Then, not long after my mother lost the paternity suit against my father, Hitler invaded Latvia. When the silence from Prael continued, month after month and year after year, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, my mother blamed My Rae for all of it.

"You! It's all because of you. I could have brought them, but you said no. 'First we get married,' you said with your big mouth. Lousy bitch, I'll tear you to pieces like a herring. A fig on you," and she thrust her thumb between her index and middle fingers, waving it in front of My Rae's nose in a shtetl version of giving someone the finger. I sat on the bare floor and bawled. "And Moishe would have married me, but you had to butt your lousy two cents in."

"The cholera should take me. I should die in their place." My aunt wept for her multiple sins.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was getting dribbles of information during the war about the fate of those overseas. My aunt went to them and kept going back. Nothing. Then at the end, in 1945, came the tardy news that in the summer of 1941 the Jews of Prael had been made to dig their own graves and were murdered on the spot. No one survived.

My mother shrieked, tore her hair, fell to her knees. I fell on top of her, shook her to remind her, "You have me, Mommy. Mommy, don't cry." I didn't know to weep for the relatives I'd never seen, but something terrible was happening to her. I wailed. Now we shrieked together, high keening sounds, and my scalding tears were fluid fire down my cheeks.

My aunt, wailing herself, still remembered me. She lifted me up and held me to her heaving breast.

My mother sat upright on the floor and stared. "Everything you took from me. Now you want to take my baby," she screamed. "A mameh ohn a boich vaytik, a mother without a bellyache you want to be. You lousy bitch, you can't!" She threw a shoe at my aunt's head.

Maybe my aunt reasoned that since so many in the family had been killed, she had a moral responsibility to remain alive. She left us still keening and came back to the apartment a couple of hours later with a train ticket to California in her hand.

"I can't no more. I'll die," she yelled at her sister as she threw things into a cardboard valise. She wet my face with kisses and more tears and left me alone with my mother. I was five.

I cried even louder and harder than my mother for a long time. And
then My Rae's image faded from my mind. As hard as I tried, I could only remember her foghorn voice and her long blue eyes.

My mother cursed the walls, naming both her sister and her lover, my faithless father, whom she hadn't stopped loving. Then, despite the paternity suit, she and my father began again. Maybe they'd never stopped and I didn't know about it because my aunt had kept me distracted with lullabies and
tzimmes.
Now we moved into a furnished room on Fox Street, "by a Missus," my mother called it, who would take care of me while my mother worked and on Saturday nights and all day Sunday, when she was with her lover. Mrs. Kalt, the woman's name was. She talked to me in Yinglish and patted my back with gruff, absent-minded strokes when I cried because my mother was gone, and sometimes she gave me three pennies so I could run to the dark, sweet-smelling candy store on the corner and buy myself a charlotte russe with a little mound of whipped cream that I could wrap my tongue around.

My mother and I slept in the same bed, and some nights I was startled awake by soft whimpers, like a forlorn child's, but they were my mother's. Was she crying for Moishe? For the lost relatives? I didn't know, but I cried too, the same wretched little sobs. We held on to each other and whimpered together.

But we weren't always miserable. Some Saturday mornings, to my ecstasy, she took me to Crotona Park. I struggled to reach her arm as we walked along the paths. "Mother and daughter," she said. Our skirts blew in the gentle breeze, and I held on to her tightly.

Sometimes we'd stop to rest on a bench and she'd sing—her voice sliding up and down—songs from "Your Hit Parade" that she must have heard from the other women in the shop.
It had to be you, wonderful you. It had to be you, wonderful you,
she knew the lyrics imperfectly. "On this bench me and Moishe sat the first time I went out with him," she confessed to me or the wind one morning.

Of course our movie-going resumed:
All This and Heaven Too, Together Again, Back Street
—that was her favorite; I saw it at least four times. "What's a backstreet, Mommy?" I asked. If she knew, she never told me.

Though I didn't understand most of what I saw, I learned to speak
English without a Yiddish accent through the movies. And it was there that I came to understand female gorgeousness: women with glossy waved coifs, spider-leg eyelashes, and bold lipstick, elaborate drapes and flounces over statuesque, well-corseted figures, shapely legs (but never as shapely as my mother's) in seamed nylons and high heels; women who were sophisticated, glamorous. My mother tried to copy them on the Saturday nights she went out with my father.